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Tag Archives: watercolor

Yesterday was my co-workers birthday, so I painted him a birthday card. The painting is a view of Half Dome across the Ahwahnee Meadow in Yosemite and is actually based on a photo that my co-worker took, which he found very touching. It was a fun card to give 🙂

My Dad is very hard to find gifts for, I guess because he doesn’t ever really want anything. Sometimes he needs new sweaters or a new baseball cap, but I’m not sure he really cares about getting those kinds of gifts. I’m not sure why. I love presents. Socks, scarves, books, candy bars–I don’t really care. Unlike my Dad, I just think presents are fun.

Anyways, because I really didn’t know what to get for my Dad, I decided to make him a painting. See, I made him a teeny tiny painting of a house several years ago, and he still has it hanging on the wall, so I figured a painting is a gift he might actually enjoy getting.

The little artwork I made for him this year is supposed to be our camper during a trip we took as a family many years ago to Mackinac in Michigan. We stayed at this cute little campground on the water and camped right on the beach. It was pretty.

I gave him the painting on Christmas and I think he liked it. He said something like, “Well, that doesn’t exactly look like our camper, but this must be us in Mackinac!” and then smiled brightly. It was nice.

On Saturday night, I made this gouache painting of a city skyline at sunset, which is actually composed of a background and multiple layers of watercolor paper shaped like buildings. Here’s how I did this:

I cut a piece of watercolor paper into pieces – 1/3 for the painting background and 2/3 for the layers of buildings.

Next, I painted the background using orange red and orange yellow gouache.

After that, I cut out the layers of buildings, starting with the shortest buildings and moving to the taller buildings on the back layer.

Then, I painted the layers using black and grey paints. The first layer is all black and the last layer is mostly grey with a teeny bit of black.

Next, I used a glue stick and glued all the layers on, with the tallest grey layer on the bottom.

Finally, I used a white Uni-ball Signo pen to make the little windows.

On Thursday night, I toyed around with my gouache paints and a leaf, which I used as a sort of stamp, to make this watercolor. Turned out pretty cool and inspired me to order some neon paints. Can’t wait to work with those.

Tonight, I made this rather random pumpkin head bird trainer guy. This piece came about as I was looking through a free booklet of photography I got at one of the museums in Barcelona. There was a picture of a bird trainer in it, which I thought was already kind of weird. I decided it would be fun to make it weirder.

I am so excited. I entered this scary doodle, entitled Heartless Monster, in a doodling contest on the website Doodlers Anonymous and voting is now taking place to pick the winning drawing. Please, please, please help me win by visiting the contest page here and voting for my doodle. To do this, scroll down to my drawing and hit “fav” to vote. Note that you will have to create an account to vote. Thanks!

Last Wednesday, I played around with my watercolors. Mostly, was trying to use salt to push away the watercolors, but it wasn’t working with the cheap paints I was using. Then I pulled out a tube of color and it worked. Definitely looked cool.